Oracle Blog

Blog for dlacher

Thursday Sep 04, 2008

As I mentioned yesterday the next release of ClusterTools is out today... below is an official announcement.

Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.0 is based on Open MPI 1.3 and it is the first release of ClusterTools to include support for Linux platforms as well as Solaris. It also provides support for MPI application profiling with Sun Studio Performance Analyzer (available in Studio Express 7/2008). MPI is the dominant programming paradigm for cluster applications in High Performance Computing (HPC), and HPC ClusterTools provides a production-quality MPI -- supported by Sun -- which is crucial to today's compute-intensive HPC workloads.

Key features of HPC ClusterTools 8.0 include:

Support for Linux (RHEL 4&5, SLES 9&10), Solaris 10, OpenSolaris

Support for Sun Studio compilers and tools and GNU/gcc toolchains on both Solaris and Linux OSs

MPI profiling support with Sun Studio Analyzer, plus support for VampirTrace and MPI PERUSE

Infiniband multi-rail support

Mellanox ConnectX Infiniband support

DTrace provider support on Solaris

Enhanced performance and scalability, including processor affinity support

Support for InfiniBand, GbE, 10GbE, and Myrinet interconnects

Plug-ins for Sun Grid Engine (SGE) and Portable Batch System (PBS)

Full MPI-2 standard compliance, including MPI I/O and one sided communication

Friday Sep 07, 2007

Back in '03 I was present as the team from SDSCROCK together a fully working cluster in two hours. There was a great time lapse video of the event made. Well that was then, so what is happening now. ROCKS continues to move forward and is a great method for cluster distribution that enables end users to easily build computational clusters, grid endpoints and visualization tiled-display walls. But for now it is on Linux. That is all well and good unless you want a HUGE Solaris cluster and want to use ROCKS. ClusterTools has a nice installer that will allow for an admin to take an existing node and install CT on it and get it working in a cluster. A savy admin can even get all the installation of CT setup in JumpStart.
Well now there is an effort underway to get ROCKS up and working with Solaris. So I am sure that means there will be some changes coming to the CT install to help support this. This is all very exciting so stay tuned as more data becomes available that I can share.

Friday Nov 03, 2006

So in working on a large community project there are changes that sometime slide past the guy working on package prototype files... The previous four or five years while doing software release engineering I dealt with and used static (or basically) prototype files for building packages. I have to tell you that I am making the switch over to using pkgproto (1). We made the decision to simplify how we were breaking up the files into packages and move over to dynamic prototype files. In the end the same bits are delivered and it make my life a lot less messed up.